Is this how the Isley Brothers must have felt performing their song Shout to British audiences after Lulu had scored a hit with it? After an hour spent trying to divine some commitment from a strangely indifferent audience, the Zutons’ frontman Dave McCabe introduced Valerie – the song which, thanks to Amy Winehouse’s version, has helped to pay off his mortgage – to an ecstatic reaction.

At that point, you realised how strange it must sometimes feel to be a Zuton right now. Such is the fame of the woman who covered their song that, in between releasing their second album two years ago and putting out their new one, You Can Do Anything, some of her audience appears to have rubbed off on them.

And yet, beyond That Song, what else were they there for? If the muted reaction to the machine-gunning powerpop of Zuton Fever and Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love was anything to go by, you suspected they didn’t really know. A chance to enjoy an after-work drink in a scenic location seemed to be the primary motivation for many of the besuited office workers present. And yet, to the Liverpool quintet’s credit, they fired off most of their more upbeat songs with a hunger you would expect from younger acts desperate to make it through to the next heat of a local talent contest.

The exquisitely languoro us Dirty Rat distinguished itself, as did What’s Your Problem, one of many Zutons songs that, lyrically, contrives to sound like a man having a domestic with his girlfriend on a mobile phone.

Confusion still surrounds just how necessary the contribution of saxophonist Abi Harding is to the sonic tableau – can anyone name a saxophone part on a Zutons song that has appreciably improved it? – but on stage her raison d’être seemed to be marginally clearer. She pretended that her instrument was a guitar on Pressure Point, all the better to trade a few phantom licks with McCabe. But was any of this enough to make Zutons fans of the merely curious? Only when they played the song that came straight after it.

Which brings us back to where we came in. As the guitarist Paul Molloy supplanted Mark Ronson’s horns from the collective memory of Valerie and reinstated the bourbon-scented guitar licks of the Zutons’ original, the look on McCabe’s face told its own story.

Having given it his best, he momentarily looked less like the singer in a band and more like a passing relief teacher with no incentive to bond with a class he might never see again.

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